While it is true that the more money that you make, the higher the percentage of that money made is spent on eating food outside of the home, the difference between poor people and upper class people or poor people and middle class people, is that those with more money can avail themselves of more dining options by virtue of the fact that they have more money. When you are poor, making smart and informed decisions about how and where to spend your money is imperative, yet, often, those decisions made are not wise or prudent. While there is something to be said about treating your family to a fast food meal as a reprieve or a thank you from time-to-time, there is something more to be said about having the discipline and structure to actually cook or prepare meals at home as being far more cost conservative, as well as, in general, being more healthy in the content of the food consumed.
While it is quite unfortunate, that impoverished people are often surrounded by a plentitude of fast food restaurants offering plenty of calories for the cheap, the quality of those calories are often too sugary or too high in refined carbohydrates to do a body good. In addition, poor people often have more corner convenience stores that once again, typically don't offer a lot of healthy choices for those wishing to grab something quickly and take home to eat or to snack on. In fact, the only real way, that indigent people have any hope of both saving money on food as well as eating a meal that is more healthful for them is to have a grocery store near their place of residence, or work, or available nearby through some sort of transportation.
While, young people, have never known a world without fast food being both prevalent and common to indulge in, in actuality, fast food as an industry did not start its rise until the 1950s, and while there are many reasons for fast food restaurants to exist, such as their convenience, their fairly reasonable cost, their fresh off the grill food, and the perceived lack of time to prepare one's own meal, each one of those reasonsisn't by itself a good enough reason why so many Americans routinely indulge in buying fast food, sometimes, even multiple times in one day.
The fact of the matter is, all things considered, it has never been easier to prepare meals at home, but for whatever reason, perhaps through heavy fast food advertising that sells the illusion that eating fast food makes for a pleasurable and deserved event, or perhaps because so many people just don't perceive that they have the time or are able to structure the time to buy and prepare their own meals, the eating of fast food is considered nowadays to be as American as the eating of apple pie.
The thing is, while it is a given that the poor have always been with us for proverbial generation after generation, millennium after millennium, fast food has not been, and fast food in and of itself, is not helping the needy to utilize the little that they have in the most prudent and effective way. It is, as the old adage goes, far better to teach a man how to fish, than to give a man a fish, so that, it would seem to behoove all governmental and school services to expend a much greater effort in providing the basics to the general public and especially the indigent poor on how to buy, cook, and to prepare good, healthy and cost effective meals at home, as this skill seems to have become essentially dormant in far too many households that are struggling to just make it day by day.